Stream On:
Food, Power and Resistance in
Organizations
Food practices and discourses have long been of interest to
sociologists and anthropologists, but have only recently
come to be explored in organization studies. In this
stream, we would like to continue this exploration by
examining how foods and food practices and discourses are
related to the construction and embodiment of subjectivity
in organisations and how such constructions, in turn, are
related to identity, power and resistance.
This is a broad theme. Indeed, how we talk about food and
what we do with food has implications for identity work,
embodiment and the normalization of power at the site of
the body and beyond. For example, food practices have long
been linked to how individuals perform the body and
construct the self amid the tensions of
consumption/hedonism and production/discipline. Food
practices threaten or support body images that normalize
gender differences and the marginalization of others -
being thin is associated with being male and/or in control.
But there may be less obvious forms of othering involved
with food practices such as the marginalization of various
food preferences, such as being vegetarian or vegan, and
also very obvious forms of othering with material
consequences, such as persons higher up in organizations
having more time to eat and more access to healthier foods.
But food practices do not just normalize power. They also
subvert it. Employees may overeat or spend time on food
related events to subvert the production/discipline
ideology and they may even refuse to eat altogether to
resist organizational attempts to make employees more
productive, reward them or invite them to socialize and
develop informal relations. In short, what we do with, say
and think about food at work implicates many, complex and,
perhaps, distinctive dynamics of subjectivity in
organizational contexts. This is the focus of this stream
and we invite theoretical and theoretically informed
empirical papers that explore such dynamics further. Topics
may include but are not limited to:
• How are food practices related to organizational
control, for example how are food related events used to
motivate and reward employees, how are they used to support
employees socializing so they can work more effectively
together and how are such practices normalized but also
subverted by individuals?
• How are food practices related to material and
embodied experiences at work? How and what do people
consume and how is this reflected in how they experience
their bodies (when chocolate is eaten the diet is broken,
the smell of meat dishes is noxious to a vegan co-worker,
etc.)?
• What do food practices tell us more broadly about
organizations as places in which excess is consumed,
produced or denied? How is such consumption related to
resistance?
• What do managerial and organizational theories, such
as those associated with affect or symbolism, tell us to
date about food practices? How are these translated into
managerial practices in reward systems and the design and
control of eating spaces and routines? What other
organizational theories, for example, the organization as
biological organism, have connections to food and what does
this mean?
• What are prominent, dominant and marginalized
narratives of food in organizations? What stories are we
familiar with and why? What stories do we find unexpected
and why?
These are just some of the topics that contributors to the
stream might want to consider. We invite critical
contributions from a wide range of disciplines and
perspectives and particularly encourage cross-disciplinary
approaches and papers that open up entirely new vistas on
food, subjectivity and resistance in organizations.
Submissions:
Please submit abstracts (maximum 1000 words, A4 paper,
single spaced, 12 point font) by November 1, 2008 to
Michaela Driver (driver@asb.dk) or any of the other
convenors.
Conveners:
- Lead: Michaela Driver is Professor of Organization
Studies at the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark –
driver@asb.dk Michaela researches alternative and
psychoanalytic approaches to a wide range of organizational
topics. In the past, her work has covered topics like
organizational learning, emotions,
psychoanalytically-grounded organizational interventions,
spirituality, corporate social responsibility, food and
embodied subjectivity in organizations. Journals in which
Michaela has published include Human Relations, Management
Learning, Journal of Organizational Change Management,
Tamara, Journal of Business Ethics and Journal of
Management Inquiry. She serves on the editorial boards of
Tamara, Management Learning and Journal of Management
Inquiry
- Andrew Sturdy is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK –
andrew.sturdy@wbs.ac.uk. He has an interest in the
translation of management ideas as well as other aspects of
organisational life, including, recently, neglected domains
such as friendship and eating and drinking practices in
relation to power and identity.
- Rob Briner is Professor of Organizational Psychology and
Head of Department at Birkbeck College, University of
London - r.briner@bbk.ac.uk Rob has an interest in emotions
and is currently co-editing a special issue of Human
Relations on eating and drinking in organizations.